28.8.11

From the GQ archives

David Lynch. Photograph: Patrick George.

GQ magazine has posted an article from its archive, which includes a Will Self interview with David Lynch. Self begins the article by noting the impact of the American filmmaker on popular culture, and recalls the first time he saw him in public (link via will-self.com):

I nearly fell off my three-legged designer chair I was so overcome with reverence and the Lynchian serendipity of all - for at that very moment my friends and I had been discussing the unalloyed brilliance of a new series that was being screened on hokey old British TV, a series called Twin Peaks - a title at once prosaic and enigmatic - that had been made by none other than the man who now stood just feet away from me.

And there, in a nutshell, is my understanding of what it is to be truly influential: creating a body of work so powerful, so possessed of its own quiddity, and yet so resonant of the world, that the adjectival form of its maker becomes a given. (Franz) Kafkaesque, (Francis) Baconian - both are adjectives that Lynch himself admires, and can be applied to his own work, but Lynchian has an X factor - it is more than the sum of these, or any other parts. [Read More]